ON THE OTHER SIDE. A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY. 199 



" Such a whim very difficult for one to realise 

 who is so deeply incrusted with civilisation, where 

 the least originality is taxed as folly is continually 

 indulged in by Nature, who laughs at the judgment 

 of fools." 



Or Thoreau hero of the Walden shanty, with 

 his open-air gospel all Nature for the asking to 

 whom a garden is but Nature debauched, and all Art 

 a sin : " There is in my nature, methinks, a singular 

 yearning towards wildness. . . . We are apt enough 

 to be pleased with such books as Evelyn's ' Sylva,' 

 * Acetarium,' and ' Kalendarium Hortense,' but they 

 imply a relaxed nerve in the reader. Gardening is 

 civil and social, but it wants the vigour and freedom 

 of the forest and the outlaw. . . . It is true there 

 are the innocent pleasures of country-life, and it is 

 sometimes pleasant to make the earth yield her in- 

 crease, and gather the fruits in their season, but the 

 heroic spirit will not fail to dream of remoter retire- 

 ments and more rugged paths. It will have its gar- 

 den-plots and its parterres elsewhere than on the 

 earth, and gather nuts and berries by the way for its 

 subsistence, or orchard fruits with such heedlessness 

 as berries. We should not be always soothing and 

 training Nature. . . . The Indian's intercourse 

 with Nature is at least such as admits of the great- 

 est independence of each. If he is somewhat of a 

 stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much 

 of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul 

 in the latter's closeness to his mistress, something 

 noble and cleanly in the former's distance. . . . 



